14+ Years of Industry Experience

Build a Textbook Rental Website Around These Features and Business Model

A recent study found that in the United States an ‘average student spends as much as $1,200 each year on textbooks and supplies alone.’ And online textbook rental platforms like Chegg, BookRenter, Textbook.com & eCampus help them in saving up to 90% of that money.

Especially in the US, textbook rental platforms are in full-swing, and in all the other markets need of such marketplaces is great. This makes online textbook rental marketplace, a great area of opportunities for aspiring entrepreneurs.

If you also aspire to launch a textbook rental startup, then this post will help you deploy your business idea in the best possible manner by explaining;

Business Model

So, rather than an innovative business idea, online textbook rental platforms are a modified form of an existing but under-functioning marketplace that solves a pain point for students at all levels. But the interesting part is that these textbook rental platforms can be turned into complete education hubs. Top players of this marketplace such as Chegg & BookRenters have already accomplished this feat by offering the following set of services:

Homework help to students through live tutors, textbook solutions, and community Q&A

Counseling students to find the right college, courses, internships, and jobs

Scholarship program to empower students at different levels and of different origins

Apart from these, there is much more you can offer to students through your textbook rental platform. All that we will cover after discussing the essential marketplace features first. For now, let’s figure out these platforms can generate revenue.

Revenue Generation Model

The textbook rental websites can make money from following revenue channels:

Website Features and Services

Despite the extensiveness of the offered services, your website should be quite easy to use, understand, and navigate through. But then, ‘The simpler a website to use, the more complex it is to build.’ So, you be prepared to do a little brainstorming and we are here to assist you. Let’s begin with the essential features & components you would need to build an advanced textbook rental clone website.

Homepage Features

Top navigation bar with tabs for all your offerings. On mouse hover, each of these tabs should pop up a drop-down list of services available under it

The Homepage banner should also feature a search tool box to help students search for Textbooks, solutions, tutors, community Q&A, etc. (depending on your offered services)

You can use the below-the-fold section of the homepage to explain your different offerings, and put the important quick-links for different services and content-based pages in the footer area.

Search Tool

It would be good to have a common search tool box for textbooks, solutions, tutors, and community Q&A search. Although it would a bit tricksome to implement at the backend but considering the ease it will provide to your target audience, it will be totally worth it. To make things look even better, you can add another input field in the search tool that lets students choose the category before starting a search.

How It Works

If you are planning different education-related services through your textbook rental platform (which you should), then you have two choices for the How It Works section. Either create a dedicated How It Works page and explain how your different services in different sections, or explain how the service works on its dedicated landing page. We would recommend the latter.

Now, let’s list all the offerings and essential marketplace features under them:

Renting/Buying Books

Students should be able to rent or buy a book by simply searching for the book using its name, author’s name or ISBN, just like on a regular ecommerce website. The book page should have following details and options:

Textbook’s renting, selling and listed price along with savings

Textbook solution’s price

Textbook’s details

Other textbooks of the same subject category

Breadcrumb for book listing at the top to provide students easy navigation

In addition to these features & options, you can offer following value-added services to make your textbook rental clone website more advanced.

Offer free shipping beyond a certain amount of order

Returning a book doesn’t cost student anything. All they have to do is use the prepaid return shipping label that comes with their order

Additionally, either offer instant access to the corresponding eBook until the delivery or offer same day/next day delivery

Selling Books

Students should be able to list & sell their used books on your website simply by entering the name or ISBN number of the book. Two important features that you must include under this service are:

Criteria for acceptable books (condition, year, etc.)

An algorithm to automatically generate a price for that book based on the provided information

If you planning to build your textbook rental platform through a clone script, make sure it has these important features.

Study Help

Through this section, students should be able to get help with their homework and exam preparations. Services listed under this section would be:

Textbook Solutions: Step-by-step solutions to textbook problems

Expert Q&A: A 24/7 live community of students and subject matter experts to help each other in solving textbook problems and understanding concepts

Online Tutors: Through this service, students should be able to schedule private tutors with subject experts (teachers/ private tutors)

In addition to these, to make your platform more valuable for students you can offer following services:

Definitions of key topics & concepts: The section would feature definitions and explanations of various key concepts of Mathematics, Science, Engineering, and Business. Students can either search for the topic, navigate through the subject categories and sub-categories.

GPA Calculator: A pretty eye-catching tool that would allow a student to calculate their GPA by filling a few required fields.

Adding such user-engaging value-added services will certainly have a direct impact on the retention rate of your website, consequently on conversion rate.

Internship & Job Search

This section should be dedicated to help out students in finding internship & job opportunities. The internship & job search feature should allow students to make the search using following filters:

Internship/job

Location & location type

Subject field

Full-time/ part-time/ paid/ college credit/ job

Employer type

Results should provide an easy way to visit the employer website so that students can proceed further. Besides these, you can also ask students to upload their resumes, so that you can offer them even better results.

In addition to that, you can maintain a comprehensive Q&A and article section to council students pursuing the right career path based on their qualification, skills, & interests.

College Search

If you are to become a total education hub for students, you’ve got to help out them in searching the right college in accordance with their academic achievements and career goals.

This section should help students explore colleges, their details, their offerings, etc.There should be a search toolbox which allows students to search college & filter results based on following criteria:

Location

Course duration

Gender Preference

Religious affiliation

The college page should feature all the details regarding its offerings such as:

Courses offered

Infrastructure

Student Experience

Location details

Student population, sex ratio

Admission cost, tuition fee, etc.

Facilities available

In addition to that, you can also implement a ‘compare college’ feature that lets students compare colleges based on above mentioned college details. This feature will certainly make your website more valuable and take its user-experience to a new level.

Scholarships

To establish yourself as a brand, you should offer scholarships to students on the merit basis or on other criteria, depending on your target market. For instance, US-based online textbook rental business Chegg offers following scholarships through its platform:

For Hispanics

For Africans-Americans

Merit based scholarship

Easy Scholarship (for high school students)

This list should give you a fair idea about the scholarships you should include in textbook rental business.

So, these were the services you need to offer through you textbook rental clone website. Now, let’s quickly overview the user profile options.

Signing Up and User Profile Options

The signing up process should be simple and should allow students to register via email, as well as social media accounts. And the student profile should have following features:

List of rented books

Check order history

Extend the period of a rental book

Quick links to sell books, track orders and Help section

And a quick FAQ section explaining basics services

Blog

Including a blog in your textbook rental script is certainly a sure thing. Through, the blog you can provide more value to students as well as keep them informed about your new services.

Mobile App

Make sure you build a mobile app for Android and iOS devices to let students leverage your services on-the-go. The mobile app should be a trimmed down version of the website, but with all the major services for students intact.

Referral Program

Launch a friend referral program, through which students can earn some monetary rewards that can be used towards making transactions on the website. Implementing this program will also help you build a user-base.

Community Program

Being an education hub, you should also get involved in the community programs that make students aware of various social & environmental issues. Get associated with related non-profit organizations, arrange seminars and debates at campuses. In long run, it will help you in establishing a brand.

Final Words

In the past couple of decades, the rise of the online education platforms have simplified education at various levels. There are platforms like edX, Udemy & Coursera that enable students across the globe to study courses offered in best schools on the planet. There are platforms that help students find local tutors and schedule private lessons to improve grades. And there are platforms like Skillshare and General Assembly that provides students and professionals work-based or project-based training classes to help them advance in their career.

In contrast to all these, online textbook rentals fulfill a more fundamental need of students. And that fundamental need is what has triggered the success of different players of this marketplace. The important thing for new players is that they pay extra attention to what extra value-added features they can add to their platform to attract more students. That is where our post will be of great help. And if you need more such insights for your online textbook rental clone website, then we would be glad to be of some additional help.

Disclaimer: The Blog has been created with consideration and care. We strive to ensure that all information is as complete, correct, comprehensible, accurate and up-to-date as possible. Despite our continuing efforts, we cannot guarantee that the information made available is complete, correct, accurate or up-to-date. We advise - the readers should not take decisions completely based on the information and views shared by FATbit on its blog, readers should do their own research to further assure themselves before taking any commercial decision. The 3rd party trademarks, logos and screenshots of the websites and mobile applications are property of their respective owners, we are not directly associated with most of them.

FATbit Chef is the official broadcaster of everything that happens inside FATbit. Count on the invisible reporter for detailed analysis based posts, new service additions, and other brand related updates.